Practice Session #29

Welcome to my show notes for this session of Practice!

We record these weekly sessions every Sunday. I try to publish the audio on the same day of recording, but once in a while, I may get delayed due to various reasons.

Also, I will usually have the AI-generated transcript and my initial notes published on the same day of recording as well. On Fridays, I’ll go back through and proof the transcript while I add all of my notes.

I’ll be utilizing this opportunity to clarify and elaborate on points that I may not have conveyed as well as I would’ve liked to. I’ll also provide links to further information and resources.

So, on Friday, I’ll intersperse all my notes with the transcription from the audio below.

CK: Alright, do it.

Heyo! I’m CK, and you’re listening to Practice.

I’m your functional systems integrator, and this is my podcast where practice is not just the theme of the show, but the whole purpose behind it. I’m using this platform to practice podcasting as well as speaking in general, while espousing half-thoughts and providing unsolicited advice.

As always, I’m fortunate to be joined by my practice partner and partner in life: Pam.

Pam: Hey, that’s me.

CK: Pam is also my pattern awareness manager, and every Sunday we reflect on the past week and my progress with this practice along with other lifestyle practices. as well as theories and ideas behind the virtues of practice itself.

We’re doing this on the fly, so don’t hold me responsible for what I say here. Make sure to check out my show notes where I’ll provide some fact-checking, self-psychoanalysis, and commentary on things I could’ve done better. You may find this and more information about this project at ForcesOfEqual.com/Practice.

Today, we’re recording on Sunday, September 13th of 2020, and this is our 29th practice session.

And this week has been kind of weird for me. What about you? What would you sit well with? What’s your one word description of this week for you?

Pam: um, I don’t know about the week over all, but yesterday I would say overwhelming.

CK: Yeah.

Pam: Yeah, just quickly, I guess. Um, I did my normal Saturday grocery store trip. And while I was there, apparently there was a lot of people that were heading to a Trump rally. So there was a bunch of people wearing Trump gear and, um, you know, w we deal with people like that on the internet. And it’s one thing to see them at a distance, but to see people that were like almost frothing at the mouth.

With excitement to go to a rally that is essentially for hate was, um, I think I I’m getting goosebumps thinking about it and talking about it right now. Cause it was just, it was really, um, it really affected me to see it in person. And then I also went for a little birthday adventure to a place called the, um, OSSI open market, which has 200 stalls of vendors that are like artists and makers and you know, just little shops and I’d been wanting to go there for a while.

So I went for my birthday and it was, um, It’s a really cool place. I really enjoyed the spot, but there was so many people there cause it was their one year anniversary. And like, no one is physically distancing. People are just like in your space. And it was really overwhelming to be around that many people after being around.

No one other than you for so long, like I just wanted to be back home.

CK: Yeah. Yeah. That’s interesting. You’ve developed a sense of normalcy being at home and isolated, whereas there’s this whole other spectrum of people who are returning to the normal, see that they’ve had before. And now there’s this duality going on.

Pam: I’ve always preferred staying home. Like I’m just a home body. So I think it’s just exacerbated now.

CK: It’s more pronounced.

Pam: more pronounced and all these other people that prefer to be out and about are so excited to be doing that. Like

CK: And it’s more pronounced on that side.

Pam: Yeah. Yeah. So they’re really like pumped to be out shopping and interacting with people.

Meanwhile, I’m like get away from me.

CK: Yeah. That’s interesting. And that brings up something that I ran across earlier this week. And I believe it’s called the theory of dual entitlement. So in economics, I believe it comes from economics where there’s the notion that the consumer wants the best price available for them. But obviously the.

Business or the company also wants to make the most, or, you know, set the best price that’s available for them. So you’re coming at two different sides. And obviously in order to reach some kind of success with the product, you have to have some kind of compromise. So you’re coming from this place, this, these two different sides and reaching a compromise.

So. It’s it just goes to show the importance of context and in terms of relating this to like our society and how people react to each other or understand things or just interact, oftentimes we’re very. Inundated with our own thoughts and ourselves in our thing, don’t consider where other people are at in their lives.

And so that other side of that dual entitlement theory. So obviously you have you think of what you’re entitled to, but oftentimes we don’t think of what other people are thinking they’re entitled to. And so that’s why there’s a lot of conflict in terms of trying to agree on certain stances or beliefs or whatnot.

So just an interesting point.

Pam: I could list off 15 things that happened yesterday that are, you know, me looking at people thinking that they were in, they were feeling entitled, but meanwhile, they are, you know, looking at me thinking that. So it definitely makes sense.

CK: right. So I felt like my week was weird because of the sky and the smokiness and the cloudiness. And it’s kind of like, we’ve been in Twilight for the past week.

Pam: It’s been Erie,

CK: Yeah, and we haven’t had like full, bright sunlight and obviously there’s issues like seasonal effectiveness disorder that can play into this

Pam: seasonal affective disorder.

CK: seasonal affective disorder.

Sorry. Thank you.

Pam: I’m seasonally affected.

CK: Yeah, there might be a theory that goes along with that. Maybe we can make one up, but thanks for the correction seasonal affective disorder or sad, and that’s tends to occur during winter months and winter seasons when you don’t get as much sunlight. And so you get into sort of a depressive mood and that’s kind of what I’m like.

I’m feeling like that kind of notion with this smoky sky and the cloudiness. It’s weird. And it’s also different because then the sun is a whole different color. It’s like this eerie orangy glow

Pam: Red sometimes.

CK: Yeah, totally.

Pam: And we’re not even getting the worst of it. Like San Francisco and Portland are like, the whole town is. Red or black, depending on what is going on and where you’re at. It’s

CK: Yeah,

Pam: to think about. So like that combination of not only is our environment different, but then there’s like that mental load of realizing why it’s that way.

And, and that all these other people have it even worse.

CK: Yeah, totally. So, yeah, that’s how our weeks have been going.

Pam: And then I went out and ran in that air quality. And so my lungs are a little bit messed up now.

CK: Yeah. That’s yeah, it’s all this. Yeah. I mean for people, yeah. For people who like us who enjoy being outdoors and enjoy the sunlight, it’s a lot to have to consider. So. You know, we can’t do things that we normally would do so that we have to consider all that, but let’s move on. And I’ll say our quote for the week, and this comes from stoke philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, and he’s one of my favorites.

And one of the big three that I’ve mentioned before the others being Seneca and Epictetus, who we’ve had quotes from before. And Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor and a lot of historians consider him to be the greatest Roman emperor of all time. And he is the, he was the emperor of Maximus or really is in gladiator, the movie gladiator, which I love one of my favorite movies.

And Maximus is a really, this is actually a fictional character, but in that fiction, his leader was Marcus. It really is who got murdered, I believe, or no, he got, he died from the Antonin plague, which has a lot of crossover with what’s going on today with the coronavirus actually. But I’m not going to go too much into that.

So let’s just get into the quote. And it goes like this. You can discard most of the junk that cluttered your mind and clear out space for yourself by comprehending the scale of the world. By planning infinite time by thinking of the speed with which things change each part of everything. The narrow space between our birth and death, the infinite time before the equally unbounded time that follows.

So it’s just, he’s just basically talking about broadening your perspective. And this is a lot of what I like to espouse in terms of broadening perspective and spectral potentiality, and how your range of perspective is. Correlated with your intelligence or that’s how I like to see it anyway. So we’ll try to see if we can weave things in and out with that coat throughout this session. And on that note, I’m going to try to keep this session doing half an hour to a half an hour. Like I wanted to all along, we’ve been going over the past couple of weeks. Without me even realizing because things seem to be flowing pretty well now. And on that note, I would also like to mention that I reading through the intro today, I realized that I want to change some things up.

And I started out this practice of podcasting too. Practice podcasting and practice speaking. And I’ll always be practicing those things as I do them because I can always improve. And I understand that I can always get better, especially with speaking. I feel like I’ve made a lot of improvement from the first episode. And I most thing that saying that I’m practicing speaking now maybe hindering me a little bit because I’m kind of using it as a crutch. If I mess up or can’t figure out what to say, like. I have that little nugget in the back of my mind. That’s telling me, Oh, it’s okay. This is just practice. You can just.

Flub, whatever sentences or words, or if your brain, the source isn’t working, that’s fine. It could cause it’s just practice. And while that’s true, I don’t want to lean on that and be okay with just messing up or not improving week to week, basically. So I’m thinking of looking at things moving forward as.

This practice of self reflection and focusing less on the practice of speaking with the idea that, of course I am practicing speaking, but I feel like I’m at a level where it’s like, what we’re doing is fine here. Like I’ve been listening to the past few episodes and it’s, for me, it’s been fun to listen to and comparing myself to the other podcasts that I listened to.

Unlike. You know, we’re not, I’m not very far from speaking in a manner where I’d even be comfortable being on another podcast that I listened to and listening back. Whereas before, obviously I’d be very anxious about going on a podcast or being in a guest. That’s not saying that I’d have that opportunity now, but just saying if I did have that opportunity, that I’d be fine.

And I think I come off is an okay speaker or fine speaker, or, you know, it’ll be good enough. And I’ll. See myself as being good enough, if that makes sense.

Pam: totally agree. So it’s time to level up your goals for the podcast.

CK: Yeah, totally. And the thing is like the way we’re doing this podcast and the way that we’re doing it on the fly. Like, I don’t really prepare much of anything for these episodes other than the quote. And I have the intro in front of me, but I basically have that memorized. And so. Everything else I’m just coming up with on the spot.

And usually the podcasts that I listen to, it’s all prepared or a lot more prepared than these sessions and also they’re edited afterwards. And so it’s, I’m kind of putting all this out there in a raw format and now I’m. Coming to a point where I’ve think I’ve developed myself and these episodes enough that it’s on a sufficient level.

And so I would say, Oh, kind of a tangent. My favorite podcast app is overcast. And are you still using? I don’t have a guest. Okay. And overcast has this awesome feature called Smartspeed. Where they use AI to determine where to send speed things up or slow things down in the audio feed, depending on how you pause.

And I don’t know exactly what goes in the algorithm, but it’s really smooth rather than just spitting up like 1.5 or two times, which tends to sound a little artificial and. Not so natural. Yeah, exactly. And with Smartspeed from overcast, it speeds up, but it also sounds natural. So you don’t necessarily, you can’t necessarily tell that it’s sped up unless you speed it up a lot, but still it’s easier.

The flow is a more natural flow. So it’s like you’re talking faster rather than talking normally and spitting up. So I don’t know if that makes sense, but it makes a difference coming out in the audio. So I recommend listening to me via overcast with Smartspeed because then that makes it sound totally awesome.

It makes me sound like a really good speaker because it takes out the pauses. And a lot of my pauses tend to be a little longer. Because I am sorting through a lot of stuff in my head, but a lot of other podcasts they’ll just take out the pauses in post-processing. And then at the same time, there may be some tools and plugins for post-processing that do similar things as what overcast Smartspeed does.

So there may be some editing in terms of that. But yeah, just kind of a tangent. Um, but I guess it’s all just to say that I am starting to get more confident in myself and I’m enjoying, listening back and realizing that I actually do know what I’m talking about most of the time and that I can put some of these ideas together on the fly.

So yeah, that’s where I’m at and trying to move on. Um, let’s see. So I don’t know. I have so much going on in my head this past week and it’s been all kind of all over the place, but I think I may want to expound on what I was talking about the past couple of weeks in terms of the headless way, as well as the.

Three categories of brain evolution, because what I discovered while I was journaling, actually this past week was the by ssociation or crossover of those two frameworks, I guess you can call them. So to recap real quick, the. Three stages of the human brain evolution started out with the lizard brain.

And then there was the mammalian brain and then the human brain actually it’s the lizard brain and paleo mammalian brain, which is the early human early mammal brain. And then the Neal mammalian brain, which is the evolved even brain with the frontal lobe and the prefrontal cortex and all that stuff.

So. If we take those and then consider the four stages of the headless way where we had the child, or I’m sorry, the baby, the child, the adult, and the sphere, the first three stages of a headless way. Line up with the three categories of the a P it’s referred to as the Tribune brain tri meaning three. So trying brain refers to the three categories of brain evolution.

So if we’re looking at the lizard brain, which is more towards the stimulus response end of the spectrum,

The lizard just responds to what it’s given basically. And this could be related to the stage of the baby in the head, this way, the baby’s more stimulus and response. And if we continue the metaphor of the baby, doesn’t see its own head. So the baby doesn’t really know of itself. It just knows of what’s out there and responds to what’s out there.

So there’s that. Association there with the lizard brain and the baby, and then with the paleo mammalian brain, which is where you have the beginnings of the processes of learning as well as emotion. There’s, there’s some learning with this stimulus response category, but it’s evolved with emotion in the paleomammalian brain.

Okay. And it’s associated with reactions. So in addition to stimulus in response, there’s an added part of the reaction and emotion. And this can relate to the child stage of the headless way where the child begins to understand that. It is a being within himself and understands that what it sees in the mirror is a self, but is also very much in tune with what’s going on outside of them.

And probably even more in tune with that. Like they’re more susceptible to there. Super systems and obviously their parental systems, which is their super social system and their peers, their social system. So that there’s that crossover with the paleomammalian brain and the child stage. And then with the neomammalian brain, which is the developed brain where you have the frontal lobe and the prefrontal cortex.

Which offers you executive thought and the ability to reason and add space between stimulus and response and space between stimulus and reaction and separate emotion from reason. And that could relate to the adult stage of a head of sway where. It’s basically the same things, all the same associations where the adult, uh, I mean, it’s not, uh, completely, uh, it’s not a perfect relation, but the growth is there, but in that thinking there, so there isn’t a fourth stage of the evolution of brain evolution.

Pam: That we know of.

CK: Exactly. So. I’m thinking the fourth stage, if we keep these correlations is the fourth stage of the head this way, which is the sear, which is where you take everything that you’ve learned throughout your lifetime. So far as an adult through that adult stage and also re include. The stage of the baby where you saw everything without no head, or, uh, I did a double negative there where you saw everything with no head.

And so what I’m thinking is that we, as humans are still in, or we can still evolve. And we have more progress to make in terms of brain evolution. And I would go as far to say that we still need a lot of work on the third stage in terms of utilizing our executive function and our capabilities to reason.

So we still need more work there, but there’s yet another stage to reach, which correlates with this stage of the sear in the headless way. So that’s kind of what I’ve been thinking about this past week. Does that make sense?

Pam: it does. It makes total sense. And I think it’s, um, that ongoing battle between where we. Where a lot of people think that we need to get as a society. Yeah. Versus, um, where we are now, where, you know, if people were in more of that kind of phase and getting more into to that sear type mindset, our economy would be.

Affected significantly because people wouldn’t be in this constant buying cycle and filling needs with products. So there’s a whole super system that is trying to prevent us from moving into that sear, um, phase. And you know, they’re doing that by, um, you know, restricting use of psychedelics and, um, And, and not, um, making, you know, meditation and awareness practices, part of our education and how we bring up children and making that a weirdo thing and like, Oh, those, those people are the others, rather than those people being the ones that probably haven’t figured out.

CK: Yeah. That’s really interesting that you bring up psychedelics. We could go down that road a little bit real quick, where there’s a lot of theories in terms of, have you heard about the stoned ape theory?

Pam: It sounds familiar, but refresh me.

CK: I believe it comes from Terence McKenna who was very big into psychedelics. And it’s very influential in the psychedelic world. Um, but his theory is that way back during evolution of primates, it was when apes discovered, I believe it’s siliciden, which. Is mushrooms and I’m thinking it was that because it’s, it was probably found in nature.

And, uh, from what I remember, it grows and poop

Pam: Uh, I mean, I’m sure, but I think it grows kind of anywhere, but poop is definitely a good fertilizer.

CK: Yeah. Uh, um, so I, I’m not exactly sure. That’s just college or college memories

Pam: You have memories from college.

CK: a little bit, but anyway, the theory goes that the apes discovered siliciden and began tripping on them, which is what expanded their brains to form into. Well to evolve to what we have now with the prefrontal cortex and everything. Cause if you think about it, these psychedelic, these psychedelics expand our human cognition, you know, we think about things that we haven’t thought about before or

Pam: connections, it opens up pathways that aren’t available right now.

CK: exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, there’s that notion of that stoned ape theory and these other. Chemical methodology is to expand human performance in cognition that are out there and available and being researched. But there’s also forces out there that are trying to keep this at Bay or keep it under wraps or keep it from the general population, because who knows for what reason?

Maybe because it’ll hurt their own profits or because maybe they actually do think it’s harmful to humans, but. For whatever reasons there’s forces out there that are controlling us to some extent. So being mindful of all of these things is important. And we can go back to our quote for the week where, I mean the whole quote, it starts as you can discard most of the junk that clutters your mind.

And that’s pretty much the basis of meditation. Because in consciousness, you have this state where it’s, that you always have state where your mind is clear, but it’s these distractions and clutter and nines in all this stimulation and things that bombard you, that you get caught up with and worried about.

And you get caught in the cycle in these patterns of. Emotion or reaction emotionally and reactionary thought. And if you’re not mindful of that, you’re just living with those thoughts and then those thoughts are controlling you. So, you know, do you have free will or the power to make your own choices and make up your own mind?

Um, maybe not. If you’re not mindful. So, yeah, it just all goes to say the importance of mindfulness and perspective. And we could, like, I tout self-reflection all the time and I’ve been ramping up my own. This past week or the past few weeks with journaling, but I’ve been, I’ve started to look at a lot of things as self reflection.

So there, there may be, there might be some proxies that you can employ. So actually this practice of podcasting is actually turned into a proxy of self reflection for me because I didn’t go into it thinking, you know, I’m doing this too. Meditate or be mindful or reflect on my week, I was doing it to practice podcasting and speaking, now that has turned into a practice of self reflection.

So there might be some tools and things like that that we can talk about in the future around those types of things.

Pam: I know that we’re running short on time, but can I give a quick example of how I use self-reflection yesterday after I was leaving that shop where I was really overwhelmed. So there was an artist there, this man Lloyd, and he was adorable. He was like in his eighties and he’s a woodcarver and he made these absolutely gorgeous bowls and he reminded me of my dad and, um, He was the only like elderly man there.

And I immediately felt sorry for him. Like, I felt like he was really out of place and I felt like he thought that he had to be there to sell his products. So I like felt guilty and wanted to buy something out of guilt because of this guy being in this place where I felt like he didn’t really belong.

And I started putting all of my thoughts and emotions onto him. And it put me in a really bad mood because I felt so terrible for this guy. I almost bought a $300 bowl because I felt bad for this guy. And they’re gorgeous. Bolts are absolutely gorgeous. I’d love to have one, but I don’t know, $300 to spend on a Woodbowl.

So, anyway, as I was walking out, I realized that I felt awful. And the reason that I felt awful was had absolutely nothing to do with my interaction with this guy. He was great. And he. Probably liked being there. And I realized that I was taking away his autonomy to make his own decision. Like he’s a grown ass man.

Sorry, he’s a grown man. And he made the decision to rent this booth and he can make that decision. And. I was putting all of my stuff on him. And so I went through this process. I actually spoke out loud myself in the car. And I was like, I feel bad about this guy because he, you know, is in this situation that I wouldn’t want to be in.

And I like talked to myself through it. And I named all of the feelings that I was having about him that had absolutely nothing to do with him. And like went through this self-reflection and processed everything that I was feeling. That had again, nothing to do with him. He didn’t say a single word to me that indicated that he didn’t want to be, there was, he was a lovely gentleman.

He seemed like he was doing fine, but I put myself in that position. So that process of just talking to myself and listing all the, all the things that I was feeling and all the things that I had made up.

CK: Right. And you felt, it sounded, it sounds like you felt dissonance in the moment, dissonance in the moment and. Like you were there and you saw this guy. Well, first of all, there’s dissonance between the guy and the atmosphere or the

Pam: Yeah. Yeah,

CK: And then there was dissonance between what you were feeling and what you thought he was feeling or what, or also what you thought you should be feeling, or, and then you went into curiosity about why you were feeling that way. And then you were able to have the awareness to go into trying to sort it out. So yeah, I mean, that’s very mindful of you and your electorate, the space, and then create space for him to be there and do what he does.

So, yeah, that’s a great example. And yeah, like you said, we were running out of time today.

We’re going to celebrate Pan’s birthday with my parents and my brother and his wife. So we actually had two changes of plans already this morning, which before would have sent me into a little spiral of anxiety. But on that note, I mean, I. And totally fine with it. Like I just brushed it off and I’m like, okay, because at first it was canceled and then it was re-instituted or reinstated.

And I was like, okay, let’s do it. So we gotta get ready for that. So we’ll leave it there for this week. And before we leave off Pam, where can people find you?

Pam: you can find me on Twitter, where I am at Pamela underscore Lund.

CK: And you might be able to find me on Twitter sometime soon at CK disco and Pam. Thank you for joining me this week for practice and thank you to the listeners for joining me this week. And I hope you come back next week and keep on practicing to loo